This panel convenes scholars of religion to offer various kinds of historical approaches to understanding the politics of abortion rights and anti-abortion movements. Panelists consider topics ranging from uses of ancient history, canon law, and the development of ultrasonic technologies.
A lesser-known aspect of the 1973 majority decision in Roe v Wade is the large role played by history--several histories, in fact--in its finding. I wish to look more closely at the role played by ancient Greek and Roman history in this decision, a role that anticipated subsequent legal reasoning concerning same-sex sexuality and assisted suicide in later decades. In these latter cases, appellate courts continued to make the “Greeks and Romans did, but the early Christians didn’t” style of argument. The US Supreme Court did not take up these arguments, however, preferring to examine a much narrower history limited to the past three centuries. Such a version of constitutional “originalism” was also more subtly embedded in Roe’s arguments, both in Justice Blackmun's majority opinion and in Chief Justice Rehnquist's dissent.
Given that polling shows most Catholics support abortion rights, how can scholars grapple with the discrepancies between perceptions of Catholic theological history and the pro-choice commitments shared by everyday Catholics? This paper challenges the dominant narrative that abortion and Catholicism are incompatible by agitating the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ claim that Church teachings on abortion are “unchanged” and “unchangeable.”
This paper traces the role of ultrasonic imaging in American Christianity. It shows how Christians came to identify the fetus as a kind of proto-citizen, and therefore a killable child, only through the aesthetic registers, affective economies, and subject positions ultrasounds produced. Ultrasounds initially served as a military technology for anti-submarine warfare before becoming a medical surveillance device: both its iterations, though, taught onlookers to visualize and affectively feel the onscreen blips as living things to be either killed or saved. By placing religion within ostensibly “secular” technoscientific histories of violence, Christian opposition to abortion echoes overlooked continuities with warfare and weapons systems. This paper illuminates, then, the intimate and violent relationship between Christian anti-abortion politics and the military technologies that affectively taught them to see life aesthetically rendered as blips on a screen, sonically rendered flesh on bone, a contextless child bathed in God’s life-giving light.